Brian Naylor

In this role, he covers politics and federal agencies, including transportation and homeland security.

With more than 30 years of experience at NPR, Naylor has served as National Desk correspondent, White House correspondent, congressional correspondent, foreign correspondent and newscaster during All Things Considered. He has filled in as host on many NPR programs, including Morning Edition, Weekend Edition and Talk of the Nation.

During his NPR career, Naylor has covered many of the major world events, including political conventions, the Olympics, the White House, Congress and the mid-Atlantic region. Naylor reported from Tokyo in the aftermath of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami, from New Orleans following the BP oil spill, and from West Virginia after the deadly explosion at the Upper Big Branch coal mine.

While covering the U.S. Congress in the mid-1990s, Naylor's reporting contributed to NPR's 1996 Alfred I. duPont-Columbia Journalism award for political reporting.

Before coming to NPR in 1982, Naylor worked at NPR Member Station WOSU in Columbus, Ohio, and at a commercial radio station in Maine.

President Obama on Wednesday announced the formal resumption of diplomatic relations between the U.S. and Cuba after more than half a century of hostilities. The two countries have agreed to reopen embassies in Washington and Havana.

Standing in the White House Rose Garden, Obama called it "a historic step forward in our efforts to normalize relations with the Cuban government and people."

Obama said U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry will visit Havana this summer to "proudly raise the flag over our embassy once more."

The Iran nuclear talks, which had been scheduled to wrap up Tuesday, have been extended. The U.S. and the five other nations negotiating with Tehran over its nuclear program announced they'll meet for another week, as it became clear that they weren't likely to reach a deal by today's deadline.

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, whose political career has taken almost as many turns as a roulette wheel at an Atlantic City casino, is running for president.

He made the announcement Tuesday at Livingston High School, which he attended and where he was class president. Declaring "America is tired of hand-wringing and indecisiveness and weakness" in the White House, Christie said he is ready "to fight for the people of the United States of America."

The Supreme court has ruled against an Obama administration effort to limit toxic mercury emissions from power plants, saying the costs of compliance should be taken into account at the very earliest stages of the regulatory process.

Hundreds of officers are following leads on the possible whereabouts of escapee David Sweat, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said Friday night, but it's unclear right now whether the two men were hiding out together.

The Department of Homeland Security says it is changing its family detention policies, but critics say the steps don't go far enough.

Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson says Immigration and Customs Enforcement will begin releasing families now being held at ICE facilities who are "successful in stating a case of credible or reasonable fear of persecution in their home countries."

The families will have to post a monetary bond or other condition of release.

The director of the Office of Personnel Management underwent another grilling Wednesday, this time from members of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. Katherine Archuleta sat for more than three hours as lawmakers questioned her competence and her estimates of how many government workers may have had their data breached in the hacking of OPM's computers discovered this spring.

We're still awaiting U.S. Supreme Court rulings on the two big blockbuster cases that have drawn attention this term: same-sex marriage and the Affordable Care Act. But the court did issue a number of decisions Monday in some lesser-known but interesting and important cases.

Major League Baseball says it is invalidating more than 60 million online ballots for the upcoming All-Star Game, citing irregularities.

Baseball fans outside Kansas City have been watching with shock and some outrage as the voting has so far placed Royals players in eight of the nine American League starting positions for the July 14 game.

Police in Brazil have arrested the leaders of the nation's two largest engineering and construction companies. Marcelo Odebrecht, head of Odebrecht SA, and Otavio Marques Azevedo, head of Andrade Gutierrez, were taken into custody in Friday morning raids linked to a scandal involving Brazil's state-run oil company Petrobras.

Among the nine victims of Wednesday's shooting at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C. was its pastor, Clementa Pinckney, who was also a was also a Democratic state senator. He was 41.

According to the church's website, Pinckney "answered the call to preach at the age of 13 and received his first appointment to pastor at the age of 18."

Jeb Bush formally declared his candidacy for the White House on Monday.

"Our country is on a very bad course. And the question is: What are we going to do about it? The question for me is: What am I going to do about it? And I have decided — I am a candidate for president of the United States," Bush said during a rally at Miami Dade College's Kendall campus.

With that announcement, the former Florida governor becomes the 11th major Republican candidate seeking the party's presidential nomination.

The Internal Revenue Service, hoping to reduce the number of fraudulent tax returns filed each year, says it's partnering with several tax preparation and software firms in an effort to protect taxpayers.

The initiative, announced by IRS Commissioner John Koskinen, will include steps the IRS believes will better authenticate the identity of taxpayers and the information included on tax return submissions.

The president of the largest federal employees union says all data for every current and retired federal employee and up to 1 million former employees were stolen by hackers. He says those data include names and Social Security numbers, military service and insurance and pension information.

The government has acknowledged that data of as many as 4 million current and former employees and retirees were stolen, but it hasn't detailed which employees were affected. Nor has it specified which data were stolen.

The engineer at the controls of the Amtrak train that derailed in Philadelphia last month was not using his cellphone during the time he was operating train No. 188.

The National Transportation Safety Board on Wednesday released a long-awaited analysis of cellphone records to determine whether the engineer was distracted at the time of the May 12 accident. Eight people died and some 200 others were injured in the derailment.

The inspector general of the Department of Homeland Security says his office is "deeply concerned" about the ability of the Transportation Security Administration to carry out its mission. John Roth told a hearing of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee that despite hundreds of recommendations on security procedures "some problems appear to persist."

One of the difficulties that first responders during the Sept. 11 attacks faced was problematic communication, including radios that didn't allow different agencies to speak with one another.

It would seem like a simple problem to solve, and in the years since, the Department of Homeland Security has spent heavily, equipping agencies with new radios and special reserved frequencies for them to operate on.

The U.S. Supreme Court has struck down a law that allowed Americans who were born in Jerusalem to list Israel as their birthplace on their passports.

In a 6-3 ruling, the court said that the law, passed by Congress in 2002, interferes with the president's constitutional right to recognize foreign nations. The U.S. State Department has a long-standing policy not to recognize any nation's authority over Jerusalem until Israelis and Palestinians resolve its status.

For the first time, workers at a digital media company have voted to join a union. Editorial employees at Gawker Media are joining the Writers Guild of America, after a vote in which 80 employees or 75 percent voted in favor of forming a union, and 27 employees, or 25 percent opposed.

In a post on the Gawker website, the editorial employees say the next steps are "determining what we want to bargain for, forming a bargaining committee and negotiating a contract."

The NFL, long a mainstay of network TV, will be coming to more screens this fall. The league announced that it is partnering with Yahoo to live-stream the October 25 game between the Buffalo Bills and Jacksonville Jaguars.

It's the first time the NFL will stream an Internet-only game (although fans in the two teams' markets will also be able to view the game on their usual TV stations.)

Lincoln Chafee has been a Republican U.S. senator and an independent governor and now is taking a shot at the presidency, as a Democrat.

Chafee announced his bid in a speech in Arlington, Va., at George Mason University on Wednesday. In his speech, Chafee said, "I enjoy challenges, and certainly we have many facing America. Today I'm formally entering the race for the Democratic nomination for president."